The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter

"The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is a monumental tapestry stitched from history’s scraps: neighborhood rumors, family legends, and unsolved mysteries. It’s a novel about the secrets we keep, the answers we seek, the unfinished business of the pasts we inherit. Peter Orner has already cemented his reputation as one of the great chroniclers of life in Chicago. With The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter he has become one of the great chroniclers of life full stop."

“A writer’s investigation into the mysterious death of a Hollywood starlet is a springboard for Peter Orner’s brilliant and powerfully moving portrait of two Chicago families whose braided lives tell an indelible story of politics, social history, and most of all love—bruising, inexplicable, and enduring love.  The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is exquisitely conceived, vast in its reach, and tender in its mercies. Orner is, quite simply, one of the finest writers of our time.”

“The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter is a fascinating fictional account of a real-life tragedy that captures a Chicago that has largely disappeared. A must-read for anyone interested in Chicago, the underworld, show business, and the important role of gossip columnists during the period between World War Two and the 1960s. Peter Orner weaves an absorbing tale of friendships gone wrong, gangsters, murder, and the struggles of a writer trying to understand both his and his family’s past.”

Praise for Maggie Brown & Others

"It's been apparent since his first book, "Esther Stories" (2001), that Peter Orner was a major talent...His exacting prose casts an elegiac and autumnal glow...You know from the second you pick him up that he's the real deal. His sentences are lit from below, like a swimming pool, with a kind of resonant yearning that's impossible to fake...He has that gift (Keats saw it in Shakespeare) of "negative capability"--in part that passive yet electric ability to submerge himself in the thoughts and emotions of a wide range of humans...Orner can do anything."

"There are forty-four stories in this collection, and they are all marvels of concision and compassion. Pick it up. Trust me."

"A master of flash fiction tosses Chekhov and Carver into a blender, adds a dash of Catskills wit, and serves up an effervescent cocktail conjuring sunset beach strolls and marriages on the rocks."